Software to benefit West Indies students
UB prof uses Fulbright fellowship to aid distance learning in the Caribbean

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

After years of limited access to students, higher education in the Caribbean received a major boost this summer when UB put the region's first distance-learning WebBoard online at the University of the West Indies (UWI).

The new Web application, which was provided free of charge, is a highly differentiated, distance-learning software package marked by its simplicity and ability to link messages under a topic so that all related communication can take place.

The new WebBoard places UWI in a position to increase vastly the number and quality of its distance-learning programs. This is critically important for the university, which serves the higher education needs of 15 English-speaking Caribbean nations scattered over 2,600 miles.

Distance-learning pioneer John Ellison, UB professor of information and library studies, is responsible for the ongoing development of the new application. He currently is a Fulbright fellow at UWI, where he supervised the installation of the new software and is instructing faculty in its use.

"In general, higher education for Caribbean residents has been severely limited by distance and financial constraints posed by course fees, expensive books, travel, room and board," Ellison says. "Programs-particularly expensive ones like engineering-are not always duplicated at the three UWI campuses on Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad/Tobago, so Caribbean students often must travel great distances to a campus that offers the program of their choice.

"A college education is highly valued and not taken for granted here. Because poverty is endemic to the region, families often must sacrifice greatly to permit a child to attend the university and students commonly share books, food and housing," he says.

"As a result, only 2 percent of high-school graduates in the Caribbean attend college, compared to 20-30 percent of graduates in developed countries, a situation that has serious, negative, long-term implications for the region's efforts to compete in the world economy."

Ellison says that because of its vested interest in making higher education more accessible, UWI established the UWI Distance Learning Centre and 27 receiving sites throughout the Caribbean where students can "attend" distance-learning courses originating at one of UWI's three campuses.

But the number, variety and availability of these courses had been severely restricted because the university had to depend upon technical support from foreign universities to get courses online and deliver them to students.

As a result of the new WebBoard, this is no longer the case. UWI faculty now can easily produce a large number of varied distance-learning courses in disciplines ranging from the humanities to medicine with no additional cost to the university. Students from all over the Caribbean can use it with little or no technical instruction.

"Although there are many software applications on the market that can produce similar results, they are often very costly-certainly not free-and complicated to learn and use," explains Neil Yerkey, acting chair of the UB Department of Library Studies.

Adds Ellison: "What we've installed here started out as easy-to-use, well-designed freeware that's been continually tweaked and improved by UB education instructional technology specialists Logan Scott and Robert Perini. The basic board, familiar to most Internet users and certainly to today's college students, consists of Web pages dedicated to a specific class that present course curriculum, instructions and reading lists.

To this initial design, UB specialists added a home page, links pages, a discussion board, student bio pages, information pages and a "control planner" so instructors can shut down the pages or archive them for future use.

The final product, Ellison says, allows instructors to post lectures, notes, scanned images, pictures, text, audio links and PDF files on a screen. It also provides a framework for a chatroom where students can post questions and engage in discussion with the instructor and their peers.

In addition, it enables the instructor to call upon experts from all around the country or the world to engage in discussion with his students, a fact that greatly enriches the learning experience and introduces an element to higher education that is not available, even in the traditional classroom, he says.

Ellison notes that this innovation in distance education at UWI will improve the quality of life for many Caribbean residents.

"It's already had a major impact on education in the region," he says, "and represents an important change at the University of the West Indies.

"It's going to have enormous positive implications for the education of young people for the next generation by helping to train and educate them to attract new investment to the region and allow greater job mobility among the population.

"In fact," Ellison says, "this new application works so well that it's also likely to have a major impact on the availability of distance-learning programs throughout the world."